Tween skaters invade Hampshire Mall
By: Kate Doyle and Rachel Babich
Issue date: 4/30/09 Section: Features
Flashback to 1999: You're sitting on your beanbag, watching the latest Friends and waiting for your bffl, Ashley, to pick you up for Shawn's roller-skate disco pizza party.
Flashforward to 2009: You're sitting on your circle chair, watching Gossip Girl, waiting for your roommate to pick you up for a UMass frat party, when suddenly you are hit with nostalgia for the good old days.
Suddenly you find yourself at the Hampshire Mall, standing at the foot of the greasy dimly lit staircase to Interskate91, the local roller rink. You pause for a minute, reflecting on life and how you are about to enter a sweaty mass of tweens. But it's this or Sbarro pizza and the dollar store, so you brace yourself for the nightmare to come.
We arrived at the welcome area, only to wait for a full seven minutes and 23 seconds before an employee stumbled out with a reasonable offer of $16 per person! She drove a hard bargain, but we threatened to talk to the manager and ended up paying $12 for two slices of pizza, unlimited soft drinks and rentals for two hours. However, the price was still too high for what we were about to endure. Like any traumatizing battle, what comes next is difficult to describe.
The difference between skating when you're nine and skating with you're 19 is comparable to pretending to fall asleep in the car so that your dad will carry you inside: at nine, it's fun; at 19, it's weird. We found ourselves sharing the "beginning handrail" with tiny tots, while young teens whizzed by.
All that our super conservative friend, Katherine, could say was, "They're like the real life versions of those girls played by actresses on To Catch a Predator! Their poor parents!" We normally aren't exactly in line with Katherine, but we can't imagine our parents letting us out in denim booty shorts, cropped camis, and an entire stick of black eyeliner. Actually, we can't remember even wanting to go out like that.
We also can't remember being so vivacious (re: hiking up our skirts and asking the DJ to "kiss it better" when we bruised our elbow). Then again, if we were the 20 plus year-old-men working at the rink, we wouldn't have so blatantly flirted back with the 13-year-old girls. In one instance, three young girls stretched out on the floor, while the safety referee on duty jumped over them. We almost wanted to call child services.
After that, we left pretty quickly. The roller rink was bazaar, trashy, and not as child-friendly as we remembered. But maybe there isn't such a difference between us after all; as we boarded the PVTA, we saw a drunken minidress-wearing girl project vomit. After this nightmare outting, perhaps we should have stayed in the circle chair, watching Gossip Girl.
Flashforward to 2009: You're sitting on your circle chair, watching Gossip Girl, waiting for your roommate to pick you up for a UMass frat party, when suddenly you are hit with nostalgia for the good old days.
Suddenly you find yourself at the Hampshire Mall, standing at the foot of the greasy dimly lit staircase to Interskate91, the local roller rink. You pause for a minute, reflecting on life and how you are about to enter a sweaty mass of tweens. But it's this or Sbarro pizza and the dollar store, so you brace yourself for the nightmare to come.
We arrived at the welcome area, only to wait for a full seven minutes and 23 seconds before an employee stumbled out with a reasonable offer of $16 per person! She drove a hard bargain, but we threatened to talk to the manager and ended up paying $12 for two slices of pizza, unlimited soft drinks and rentals for two hours. However, the price was still too high for what we were about to endure. Like any traumatizing battle, what comes next is difficult to describe.
The difference between skating when you're nine and skating with you're 19 is comparable to pretending to fall asleep in the car so that your dad will carry you inside: at nine, it's fun; at 19, it's weird. We found ourselves sharing the "beginning handrail" with tiny tots, while young teens whizzed by.
All that our super conservative friend, Katherine, could say was, "They're like the real life versions of those girls played by actresses on To Catch a Predator! Their poor parents!" We normally aren't exactly in line with Katherine, but we can't imagine our parents letting us out in denim booty shorts, cropped camis, and an entire stick of black eyeliner. Actually, we can't remember even wanting to go out like that.
We also can't remember being so vivacious (re: hiking up our skirts and asking the DJ to "kiss it better" when we bruised our elbow). Then again, if we were the 20 plus year-old-men working at the rink, we wouldn't have so blatantly flirted back with the 13-year-old girls. In one instance, three young girls stretched out on the floor, while the safety referee on duty jumped over them. We almost wanted to call child services.
After that, we left pretty quickly. The roller rink was bazaar, trashy, and not as child-friendly as we remembered. But maybe there isn't such a difference between us after all; as we boarded the PVTA, we saw a drunken minidress-wearing girl project vomit. After this nightmare outting, perhaps we should have stayed in the circle chair, watching Gossip Girl.
ring
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posted 5/02/09 @ 5:09 PM EST
This just in: The dollar is in the crapper (again) and children do not magically turn into sexual beings when they turn 18! Oh noes! Why, those dang kids. (Continued…)